Over the past decade, software development efforts within enterprises have grown tremendously, resulting in large volumes of software code, documentation, models, and other related electronic artifacts. A large enterprise, for example, may have a significant number of ongoing software development projects at any one time ranging in size from small projects involving a few programmers to massive endeavors involving hundreds of programmers.
In the past few years, there has been a tremendous amount of work in the area of software engineering and, in particular, the reuse of software across development projects. Reusing software can have significant advantages in, for example, reducing the resources, expense, and development time for a software project. Identifying artifacts for reuse from the various repositories of a given enterprise, however, can be a complex task. In addition to the problems involved in identifying a potentially massive number of artifacts, the artifacts are typically stored within repositories dispersed throughout the enterprise, and maintained by specialized development or operational environments.